Ecosystem Services Research: Is it up to the challenge?

Re-blogged from RELATIONAL THINKING, The People and Nature Blog

Kai Chan and Terre Satterfield

In this post Kai Chan and Terre Satterfield discuss the evolution of ecosystem services research and what it next has in store. Read more in their new research in People and Nature ‘The maturation of ecosystem services: Social and policy research expands, but whither biophysically informed valuation?‘

Over the span of three decades, ecosystem services research has gone from a twinkle in an eye to a dominant way of viewing human-nature relationships and the many constituent ecological and social benefits and consequences that might follow. That twinkle is today a prominent international science-policy platform (IPBES) with increasing conduits for ecosystem services research into decision-making at all scales in many nations. But is there a broad base of appropriate research to support just and effective decision-making? And has the field really benefited from central ideas across the natural and social sciences? ... (read more here)

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Push for Science in Policy through IPBES: Here's How to Get Started

By Kai Chan

Part of a series of posts about IPBES (the UN's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) and an inside look at its processes. More to come.

Perhaps you were compelled by the global biodiversity crisis laid out in the IPBES* Global Assessment, or inspired by its bold call for transformative change. Or maybe you've been impressed by all the news coverage, or the prominent recognition of the importance of diverse ways of knowing. If you are like the Zoom full of people who attended a recent conference session about IPBES**, one way or another you realize that IPBES is every bit as powerful and needed as its older sibling (IPCC***).

And you wonder how to get involved. This post is intended to guide you.

1. Get to know (some of the work of) IPBES. This includes a variety of assessments (Global, Regional, Land Degradation, Pollination), as well as other reports (e.g., about models, scenarios and values). For an introduction to the Global Assessment, its key points, and how to cite different pieces, see this post.

Beyond these technical pieces, though, there are increasingly accessible ways to get to know IPBES. Follow @IPBES on Twitter. Listen to the new IPBES podcast series, Nature Insight. Frequent the website, and read guest articles (like A million threatened species? Thirteen questions and answers and What Is Transformative Change, and How Do We Achieve It?).

2. Review IPBES products. Any researcher or policymaker (including students) can sign up as reviewers. You can review draft chapters, or even scoping reports (which set the stage for future assessments—including the proposed Transformative Change Assessment). To see what's open for review, follow IPBES notifications here. Here are some tips about reviewing:

(a) Don't be afraid to say, "This is confusing". IPBES products are intended to be accessible. If you're interested, and you don't understand, that's a problem (and not your problem).

(b) Think about what's there and what's not (but should be). It's easy to critique the text that's present, but also think about what else should be included.

(c) Evaluate the flow of ideas. These documents are not always easy to follow, but they should be. Many reviewers attend to particular pieces, and not how the whole fits together. The whole is important.

(d) Don't get stuck word-smithing. A little of this is welcome, but the words used are often highly constrained, so much critique here would be a waste of everyone's time.

3. (If you're early-career) Apply to be an IPBES Fellow. This is a superb program, with an international network of brilliant, interesting people.

4. (If you're established in your career) Apply to be an Expert in a scoping or assessment process. As above, see notifications here.

As I note, I started out a skeptic about IPBES. But I've become convinced that it's desperately needed and making crucial contributions to science and policy about nature and people, shining a light on the ecological crisis and possible ways out of it.

*IPBES stands for the UN's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

**This post synthesizes answers provided by Patty Balvanera, Marla Emery, Doug Beard, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, and myself at the ESA Annual Meeting in 2020.

***IPCC stands for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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Based on a work at https://chanslabviews.blogspot.com.

Distilling and discussing the IPBES levers & leverage points for transformative change

14 months ago 132 nations agreed upon the pathways to sustainability. 

   These are the Levers and Leverage Points of the @IPBES #GlobalAssessment 

   They are far more provocative than they seem. This new paper in People and Nature explains why: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pan3.10124

 

Several accompanying pieces make different points:

1. Our blog response to Peter Bridgewater, handling editor at PaN.
2. My story in The Conversation
3. An IPBES podcast, which just aired on Wed.

 

Please share with potentially interested parties. If we’re going to re-orient societal efforts towards transformative change and sustainability, we will need agreement on how, and that it’s needed.

 

Why is this in People and Nature? As a Lead Editor, I have seen firsthand the excellent work done by my colleagues there. We are collectively working towards transformative change in academic publishing. It offers precisely what my coauthors and I sought: deep interdisciplinarity and consistently thoughtful reviewing and editing. Peter’s blog (above) offers a glimpse of how we were pushed in all kinds of productive ways. In a few weeks, I’ll also share a paper Terre Satterfield and I have been working on for 8 years, also in PaN.

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Based on a work at https://chanslabviews.blogspot.com.

IPBES—An Inside Take (the Series)

By Kai Chan, a Coordinating Lead Author for the Global Assessment, Chapter 5.

IPBES (the UN's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) is making waves in the arena of environmental science and policy, particularly that dealing with biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and the multiple values of nature. It is also somewhat of an enigma, especially for those who haven't participated yet in a formal role.

But if you work in environmental science and policy, you're sure to be confronted by a wide range of questions, including whether you should get involved in an assessment, task force or review process. You might also wonder how it works, how politics enters the process (or if it doesn't), what the assessments are useful for, and how to cite them.

The first IPBES Assessment was on pollination

This series of posts is based on an inside take from someone who has been involved in multiple work packages, starting with the Conceptual Framework, but also including the Global Assessment, and now also the Values Assessment and the (proposed) Transformative Change Assessment.

Let me be clear: this series of posts is not a set of advertisements for IPBES. I entered the Conceptual Framework process highly skeptical but wondering about the questions above, and how much value there is in engaging in this kind of international science-policy process. At the time (the beginning for IPBES), the only way for me to understand what IPBES was about was to get involved. I did, and I was not initially inspired to do more. In fact, I then figured it wasn't worth my while, but at least I knew why. But years later, as you'll learn in these posts, fate conspired to rope me in.

Moreover, I keep questioning deeply whether working with IPBES is the best use of my time (worth the opportunity costs), despite some important successes. Although I've been very frustrated at times (through no fault of the IPBES Secretariat—for whom I have tremendous respect—but rather due to the institutional constraints hard-wired into the organization), I'm increasingly convinced it is.

Here are the posts in chronological order:

“You’re flying across the world for a what? A conceptual framework? A diagram?” Aug 24 2013

IPBES: Intense Politics of Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services, Sep 4 2013

Can IPBES Make Ecosystem Service Assessments Useful? Yes (from Nicoya)—with A Few Key Tweaks, Dec 9 2013

Why Does the World Need IPBES? Sep 23 2017

Ecosystem Services and NCP: There’s Room for Both in a Bigger Tent, Mar 14 2018

Citing the IPBES Global Assessment—Appropriately and Fairly for Authors, Jun 18 2020

Push for Science in Policy through IPBES: Here's How to Get Started, Aug 12 2020


CHANS Lab Views by Kai Chan's lab is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://chanslabviews.blogspot.com.

Citing the IPBES Global Assessment—Appropriately and Fairly for Authors

By Kai Chan, a Coordinating Lead Author for the Global Assessment, Chapter 5.

Updated with the formatted chapters. Part of a series of posts about IPBES (the UN's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) and an inside look at its processes. Next up is Push for Science in Policy through IPBES: Here's How to Get Started).

You want an authoritative source for the decline of nature, its implications for people, the causes of this degradation. Or a single source that reviews possible futures, pathways towards sustainable ones, or promising policy options. Chances are you want to cite the IPBES Global Assessment—but what specifically, and how? There’s the Science article, the Summary for Policymakers, the whole Assessment, and its component chapters. Your choices have important implications for which documents get read, and who gets credit.

It’s tempting just to cite the Science article based on the Global Assessment. Although I’m an author of that article, and I might have done the same five years ago, I’m going to argue that this easy strategy is both unfair and inappropriate.

Díaz et al., a great citation for the Global
Assessment—but not alone.

Díaz, S., J. Settele, E. S. Brondízio, H. T. Ngo, J. Agard, A. Arneth, P. Balvanera, K. A. Brauman, S. H. M. Butchart, K. M. A. Chan, L. A. Garibaldi, K. Ichii, J. Liu, S. M. Subramanian, G. F. Midgley, P. Miloslavich, Z. Molnár, D. Obura, A. Pfaff, S. Polasky, A. Purvis, J. Razzaque, B. Reyers, R. R. Chowdhury, Y.-J. Shin, I. Visseren-Hamakers, K. J. Willis and C. N. Zayas (2019). "Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change." Science 366(6471): eaax3100. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/366/6471/eaax3100

Why? The Global Assessment was some 1800 pages, based on three years of work by ~500 authors. As you can see from the above, only a small fraction of those Assessment authors are represented above (for understandable reasons). The Science article is a brief abstraction. Think of it as an ad of sorts. In most cases, it is appropriate to cite Díaz et al., but in virtually every case it's important to also cite the Assessment as a whole (or its chapters):

IPBES (2019). Global assessment report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. S. Díaz, J. Settele, E. Brondízio and H. T. Ngo. Bonn, Germany, IPBES Secretariat: 1753. Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3831673 https://ipbes.net/global-assessment

For the Assessment itself as above, only four names are listed (the Co-Chairs and Hien Ngo, the essential lead staff member), but Google Scholar does credit a broader set of authors (I’m not sure whom; I do know it’s on my profile). Because of this uncertainty, but also because of the imprecision of citing a massive 1800-page Assessment for a single point, it’s often better to cite the relevant chapter. You can download the full set of citations for the IPBES Global Assessment here (in BibTeX format).

There are some points that are integrative across multiple chapters, e.g., trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services, and their causes (Chapter 2 Nature, 2 NCP, 2 Drivers); transformative change and how it might be implemented (Chapters 5 and 6). In such cases, it often makes sense to cite the whole Assessment, or the Summary for Policymakers (the “SPM”):

IPBES (2019). Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. S. Díaz, J. Settele, E. Brondízio, M. Guèze, J. Agard, A. Arneth, P. Balvanera, K. Brauman, S. Butchart, K. Chan, L. Garibaldi, K. Ichii, J. Liu, S. M. Subramanian, G. Midgley, P. Miloslavich, Z. Molnár, D. Obura, A. Pfaff, S. Polasky, A. Purvis, J. Razzaque, B. Reyers, R. R. Chowdhury, Y.-J. Shin, I. Visseren-Hamakers, K. Willis, and C. Zayas. Bonn, Germany, IPBES Secretariat. Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3553579 https://www.ipbes.net/news/ipbes-global-assessment-summary-policymakers-pdf

But like with the Science article, only a small number of the 500 authors of the Assessment are authors of the SPM (the Coordinating Lead Authors, Co-Chairs, and two key staff). Again, this is understandable and appropriate (writing the SPM was a huge undertaking), and my point isn't to take issue with the rules. Rather, many Lead Authors (LAs) contributed crucial insights to the chapters that formed the basis for the SPM, so let's cite the chapters also to give them credit for that.

Moreover, the SPM is not a scientific document, but rather a science-policy document. It doesn’t cite the many thousands of relevant studies in the scientific literature. These connections should be made prominent—in fairness to the thousands of authors who contributed to that large evidence base.

If you want to make a point about the evidence, cite the Assessment itself and/or its chapters. For global goals, cite Chapter 3 (below).

So, if you want to make a point about what the over-100 nations agreed to (it was 132 in May 2019), cite the SPM, but if you want to make a point about the basis of evidence, cite the Assessment itself and/or its chapters. For those interested in those finer points, below are the chapters, appropriate citation info, and what you might find most interesting and relevant within each.

A final wrinkle I just came to understand properly: Contributing Authors (CAs), who may have contributed a substantial section to the text (or just a paragraph), are not listed on official citations—even on the chapters. This is because unlike the Lead Authors, etc., Contributing Authors are not chosen for various dimensions of diversity through official processes involving the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel and Bureau. There is a need for thorough and even representation of (e.g.) scholars from less-developed nations, so I'm not arguing with the rules. But if there is a peer-reviewed paper associated with a chapter, it should better reflect the intellectual contributions of the full set of authors.

...

Chapter 1 sets the stage for the Assessment, and introduces an important historical narrative about economic development, and how some nations and regions have developed more rapidly somewhat at the expense of others, by externalizing impacts on nature.

Brondízio, E. S., S. Díaz, J. Settele, H. T. Ngo, M. Guèze, Y. Aumeeruddy-Thomas, X. Bai, A. Geschke, Z. Molnár, A. Niamir, U. Pascual, A. Simcock and J. Jaureguiberry (2019). Chapter 1: Introduction to and rationale of the global assessment. Global assessment report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. E. S. Brondízio, J. Settele, S. Díaz and H. T. Ngo: xxx-yyy. Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3831852

Chapter 2 has three parts, each essentially forming its own chapter. These review the trends since 1970 in (a) nature, including biodiversity; (b) nature’s contributions to people, including ecosystem services; and (c) the drivers of change in nature and its contributions to people:

Purvis, A., Z. Molnar, D. Obura, K. Ichii, K. Willis, N. Chettri, E. Dulloo, A. Hendry, B. Gabrielyan, J. Gutt, U. Jacob, E. Keskin, A. Niamir, B. Öztürk and P. Jaureguiberry (2019). Status and trends - nature. Global assessment report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. E. S. Brondízio, J. Settele, S. Díaz and H. Ngo. Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3832005

Brauman, K. A., L. A. Garibaldi, S. Polasky, C. Zayas, Y. Aumeeruddy-Thomas, P. Brancalion, F. DeClerck, M. Mastrangelo, N. Nkongolo, H. Palang, L. Shannon, U. B. Shrestha and M. Verma (2019). Status and trends - nature’s contributions to people (NCP). Global assessment report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. E. S. Brondízio, J. Settele, S. Díaz and H. Ngo. Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3832035

Balvanera, P., A. Pfaff, A. Viña, E. García Frapolli, L. Merino, P. A. Minang, N. Nagabata, S. Hussein and A. Sidorovich (2019). Status and trends - drivers of change. Global assessment report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. E. S. Brondízio, J. Settele, S. Díaz and H. Ngo. Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3831881

Chapter 3 assess the progress toward international goals for nature (e.g., the Aichi Targets under the Convention on Biological Diversity) and for sustainability (the UN Sustainable Development Goals):

Butchart, S. H. M., P. Miloslavich, B. Reyers, S. M. Subramanian, C. Adams, E. Bennett, B. Czúcz, L. Galetto, K. Galvin, V. Reyes-García, G. L. R., T. Bekele, W. Jetz, I. B. M. Kosamu, M. G. Palomo, M. Panahi, E. R. Selig, G. S. Singh, D. Tarkhnishvili, H. Xu, A. J. Lynch, M. T. H. and A. Samakov (2019). Assessing progress towards meeting major international objectives related to nature and nature’s contributions to people. Global assessment report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. E. S. Brondízio, J. Settele, S. Díaz and H. Ngo. Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3832052

Chapter 4 assesses a wide range of scenarios and models projecting (mostly non-transformative) changes into the future:

Shin, Y. J., A. Arneth, R. Roy Chowdhury, G. F. Midgley, P. Leadley, Y. Agyeman Boafo, Z. Basher, E. Bukvareva, A. Heinimann, A. I. Horcea-Milcu, P. Kindlmann, M. Kolb, Z. Krenova, T. Oberdorff, P. Osano, I. Palomo, R. Pichs Madruga, P. Pliscoff, C. Rondinini, O. Saito, J. Sathyapalan and T. Yue (2019). Plausible futures of nature, its contributions to people and their good quality of life. Global assessment report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. E. S. Brondízio, J. Settele, S. Díaz and H. Ngo. Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3832073

Chapter 5 assesses the pathways toward sustainable futures, reviewing a broad range of optimistic scenarios, and identifying the levers and leverage points for transformative changes towards sustainability:

Chan, K. M. A., J. Agard, J. Liu, A. P. D. d. Aguiar, D. Armenteras, A. K. Boedhihartono, W. W. L. Cheung, S. Hashimoto, G. C. H. Pedraza, T. Hickler, J. Jetzkowitz, M. Kok, M. Murray-Hudson, P. O'Farrell, T. Satterfield, A. K. Saysel, R. Seppelt, B. Strassburg, D. Xue, O. Selomane, L. Balint, A. Mohamed (2019). Pathways towards a Sustainable Future. Global assessment report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. E. S. Brondízio, J. Settele, S. Díaz and H. Ngo. Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3832099

Chapter 5 has also sparked peer-reviewed articles, including one in People and Nature. That paper, about the levers and leverage points, includes a critical reflection of what is novel, as well as a clearer and more scholarly representation of the rigorous expert deliberation process that yielded those insights. (And there, finally, contributing authors will finally get credit.)

Chan, K. M. A., D. R. Boyd, R. K. Gould, J. Jetzkowitz, J. Liu, B. Muraca, R. Naidoo, P. Olmsted, T. Satterfield, O. Selomane, G. G. Singh, R. Sumaila, H. T. Ngo, A. K. Boedhihartono, J. Agard, A. P. D. d. Aguiar, D. Armenteras, L. Balint, C. Barrington-Leigh, W. W. L. Cheung, S. Díaz, J. Driscoll, K. Esler, H. Eyster, E. J. Gregr, S. Hashimoto, G. C. H. Pedraza, T. Hickler, M. Kok, T. Lazarova, A. A. A. Mohamed, M. Murray-Hudson, P. O'Farrell, I. Palomo, A. K. Saysel, R. Seppelt, J. Settele, B. Strassburg, D. Xue and E. S. Brondízio (2020). "Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability." People and Nature. https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pan3.10124

 

Chapter 6 assesses options, obstacles and opportunities for transformative change, focusing more narrowly than 5 on particular policy and governance tools:

Razzaque, J., I. J. Visseren-Hamakers, P. McElwee, G. M. Rusch, E. Kelemen, E. Turnhout, M. Williams, A. P. Gautam, A. Fernandez-Llamazares, I. Chan, L. Gerber, M. Islar, S. Karim, M. Lim, L. J., L. G., A. Mohammed, E. Mungatana and R. Muradian (2019). Options for Decision-makers. Global assessment report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. E. S. Brondízio, J. Settele, S. Díaz and H. Ngo. Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3832107

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Based on a work at https://chanslabviews.blogspot.com.

Ecosystem Services and NCP: There’s Room for Both in a Bigger Tent

Kai Chan, Berta Martín-López, Marie Stenseke, Unai Pascual and Sandra Díaz

Part of a series of posts about IPBES (the UN's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) and an inside look at its processes.

[The following is an edited synopsis of part of our longer official response on March 12 in Science about nature's contributions to people (NCP). Re: the original article, see this IPBES news item.]

Given that the Inuit have over 50 words for snow, how does an Inuit person translate a white skier’s question, “How’s the snow?” Without a precise mapping of terms, the translation is likely to include other dimensions of meaning, including the ‘positionality’ of the questioner (a white outsider) and the underlying purpose (recreating on Inuit territory). There is no way for any outsider’s language and concepts--e.g., about ecosystem services--not to suffer the same fate: they will both lose meaning that is crucial to locals, while also accruing conceptual baggage that may alienate them. A key point of the NCP approach is to explicitly recognize the legitimacy of a context-specific understanding, which defies the predetermined categorization that is so central to the ecosystem-services approach. And thus NCP is not merely political compromise but rather a broadening of epistemologies.

The snow allegory illustrates elements of the statement that “ecosystem services are NCP”: yes, ‘ecosystem services’ represents an important subset of ways of understanding nature’s diverse contributions to people. For some—including many social scientists and humanities scholars—there is hesitation or resistance to engage with ‘ecosystem services’, since the term comes with a conceptual baggage regarding the implicit assumptions and intended purpose. Not only is there the troubling connotation in the analogy of ecosystems as service-providers like factories (Norgaard 2010), but ‘ecosystem services’ has become associated at least partly with the notion of pricing nature so as to save it (Spash 2008; Dempsey & Robertson 2012; Crouzat 2018; Castree 2017). NCP represents a response, to broaden the tent by broadening the term.

Our promotion of NCP is no battle for territory: ecosystem services researchers should keep using that term, and we will too—in appropriate contexts. It remains in IPBES’ name, our job titles, and our explanations of who we are and what we do. It is perfectly functional for some audiences, and preferable for others—but not all (Fairbank 2010). In some other contexts, we will use NCP in order to intentionally signal an approach that explicitly invites and embraces diverse conceptions of nature and our relationships with it. This conceptual broadening is especially important when stakeholders do not accept the stock-flow metaphor associated with narrowing down nature to natural capital and all of its contributions as services (Chan et al. 2016; Pollini 2016; Pascual et al. 2017).

The issue is not whether the social sciences and humanities are represented in the field, but how visible and comfortable they are, whether there could be more, and if it would be productive. There are important social-science and humanities contributions in ecosystem services, and we have all intentionally strived to make more space for these (Chan et al. 2012; Martín-López et al. 2014; Pascual et al., 2014; Díaz et al. 2015; Berbés-Blázquez et al., 2016; Stenseke & Larigauderie 2017). But many review papers have found a narrow engagement of ecosystem services research with the social sciences (Liquete et al. 2013; Haase et al. 2014; Nieto-Romero et al. 2014; Chaudhary et al. 2015; Luederitz et al. 2015; Fagerholm et al. 2016). We know of many excellent social scholars who have been turned off by the term, and some who have engaged and have contributed importantly report a persistent queasiness (Satterfield et al. 2013; Satz et al. 2013).

We favour a big tent for this party that is research on nature’s contributions, and terms aren’t one-size-fit-all. Since many scholars report continued chafing with ‘ecosystem services’, despite our efforts to stretch it, we simply intend to provide a new term to invite a broader range of scholars and knowledge holders.

References:

Berbés-Blázquez, M., J. A. González and U. Pascual (2016). "Towards an ecosystem services approach that addresses social power relations." Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 19: 134-143. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877343516300070

Castree, N. (2017). "Speaking for the ‘people disciplines’: Global change science and its human dimensions." The Anthropocene Review 4(3): 160-182. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2053019617734249

Chan, K. M. A., T. Satterfield and J. Goldstein (2012). "Rethinking ecosystem services to better address and navigate cultural values." Ecological Economics 74(February): 8-18. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800911004927

Chan, K. M. A., P. Balvanera, K. Benessaiah, et al. (2016). "Why protect nature? Rethinking values and the environment." PNAS 113(6): 1462–1465. http://www.pnas.org/content/113/6/1462.full

Chaudhary, S., A. McGregor, D. Houston and N. Chettri (2015). "The evolution of ecosystem services: A time series and discourse-centered analysis." Environmental Science & Policy 54: 25-34. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901115001239

Crouzat, E., I. Arpin, L. Brunet, M. J. Colloff, F. Turkelboom and S. Lavorel (2018). "Researchers must be aware of their roles at the interface of ecosystem services science and policy." Ambio 47(1): 97-105. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-017-0939-1

Dempsey, J. and M. M. Robertson (2012). "Ecosystem services: Tensions, impurities, and points of engagement within neoliberalism." Progress in Human Geography. http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/03/13/0309132512437076.abstract

Díaz, S., S. Demissew, C. Joly, et al. (2015). "The IPBES Conceptual Framework - connecting nature and people." Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 14(June): 1-16. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187734351400116X

Fagerholm, N., M. Torralba, P. J. Burgess and T. Plieninger (2016). "A systematic map of ecosystem services assessments around European agroforestry." Ecological Indicators 62: 47-65. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X15006482

Fairbank, M., Maullin, Metz and Associates, and Public Opinion Strategies (2010). National public opinion research project, The Nature Conservancy.

Haase, D., N. Larondelle, E. Andersson, et al. (2014). "A quantitative review of urban ecosystem service assessments: Concepts, models, and implementation." AMBIO 43(4): 413-433. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-014-0504-0

Liquete, C., C. Piroddi, E. G. Drakou, L. Gurney, S. Katsanevakis, A. Charef and B. Egoh (2013). "Current status and future prospects for the assessment of marine and coastal ecosystem services: A systematic review." PLoS ONE 8(7): e67737. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0067737

Luederitz, C., E. Brink, F. Gralla, et al. (2015). "A review of urban ecosystem services: six key challenges for future research." Ecosystem Services 14: 98-112. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212041615300024

Martín-López, B., E. Gómez-Baggethun, M. García-Llorente and C. Montes (2014). "Trade-offs across value-domains in ecosystem services assessment." Ecological Indicators 37, Part A(0): 220-228. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X1300109X

Nieto-Romero, M, Oteros-Rozas, E., González, J.A. and B Martín-López (2014) Exploring the knowledge landscape of ecosystem services assessments in Mediterranean agroecosystems: insights for future research. Environmental Science & Policy 37: 121-133 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2013.09.003

Norgaard, R. B. (2010). "Ecosystem services: From eye-opening metaphor to complexity blinder." Ecological Economics 69(6): 1219-1227. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2009.11.009

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Economizing nature as a political strategy: Is it working?

A review of Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics. Jessica Dempsey. John Wiley & Sons, 2016. 296 pp., illus. $XX.XX (ISBN: 9781118640555 paper). Book review published in BioScience. Amazon.ca

Marc Tadaki and Kai Chan

The idea that we need to “sell nature to save it” has become somewhat of a truism in discussions about the conservation of nature. Financial flows change the world, the argument goes, and if conservationists can alter those flows, they can change the world. This has led, in recent decades, to collaborations between ecologists, economists and governments in attempts to mainstream biodiversity and ecosystem services into a variety of economic framings and tools. By bringing biodiversity into the domain of economic calculus, perhaps the inherently enterprising capacities of nature can be valued and preserved. In other words, by extending the market to include biodiversity, nature should save itself!

Enterprising Nature is the first book by Jessica Dempsey, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. In Enterprising Nature, Dempsey draws on over 10 years of research into global biodiversity politics to offer a fresh perspective to these ever-important debates about the financialization and commodification of nature. In simple terms, Dempsey sets out to evaluate whether “selling nature to save it” is actually working as a political strategy. By tracing the networks of people and ideas that have influenced conservationist arguments to commodify nature, Dempsey takes readers through a cumulative series of choices made by scientists and their collaborators that has resulted in framing the conservation “problem” within a market-based framework. In so doing, she provides a window into a room that many of us have long inhabited, but whose dimensions and dynamics we have never seen so clearly. Throughout this account, Dempsey points to other ways of framing local and global biodiversity that have been rejected and marginalized along the way. By revisiting these choices and their alternatives, she argues, a new global biodiversity politics can be envisioned, and perhaps, pursued.

The argument of Enterprising Nature is developed over eight concise but meaty chapters. The introduction sketches the contours of an emerging global discourse of an “enterprising nature” that seeks to bring biodiversity within economic tools and framings. In the first section of the book, Dempsey examines two major developments in the history of enterprising nature: the ecological thinking promoted by Paul and Anne Ehrlich and others in the 1970s and 1980s, and the work conducted within Stockholm’s Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics. Through these developments, scientists shifted away from a radical critique of capitalism to instead create an “ecological-economic tribunal for (nonhuman) life” (p57). This involves constructing an inventory of ecosystem functions and then assigning equivalences, weightings, and rankings to these functions so that certain functions can be prioritised for human needs.

The book’s second section examines contemporary international efforts to value biodiversity within a market framework. In the realm of global science and governmental policy, initiatives such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the decision-support tool InVEST are used to explore the assumptions, exclusions, and implications of embedding economic frameworks in policy settings. In the private sector, Dempsey then analyses attempts by scientists to represent biodiversity as a material risk to investment actors. This risk-based “venture ecology” (p128) is less concerned with making ecosystems into commodities, and more concerned with using ecological data to reduce risk and make a “smoother space for development” (p129). As an end-goal for conservation, then, venture ecology seeks only strategic degradation rather than large-scale rehabilitation of ecological functioning.

The third section of the book considers whether any of the promised finance is flowing from the institutionalization of these new economic instruments. Dempsey maps out the figurative ecology of biodiversity finance: its main ‘species’ of actors (e.g., NGOs, government agencies, bankers), their natural habitats of interaction, and their functions within the system. She draws on observations from conferences on biodiversity finance to consider the progress being made in attempts to economize and commodify biodiversity, noting the challenges and failures that characterise many of these attempts, including the failed proposal for a “Green Development Mechanism”. In the international policy arena, Dempsey reports her experiences of meetings under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity, analyzing how colonial histories and North-South power differentials justify parties’ resistances to contemporary proposals to create financial mechanisms for biodiversity conservation.

Dempsey concludes that the promise of “selling nature to save it” has born sparse and stunted fruit; that this promise is “Conceptually dominant, but substantively marginal” (p234). Rather than allying with existing elites and seeking to extend capitalist structures of extraction and exploitation, Dempsey argues that scientists should instead consider allying with green social movements, indigenous communities, and all those who are seeking to challenge the economic relations that have produced (and continue to produce) ecological devastation at a planetary scale.

The book is a must-read for environmental scientists who have long been immersed in a world where efforts to ‘enterprise’ nature (i.e., sell it, broadly) are seen as necessary politically, and where critics are too often dismissed as utopian dreamers. Dempsey cannot be dismissed so easily. Though the book is ultimately critical of attempts to economize nature, it is sympathetic to the scientists, economists, and others who have tried to leverage ecosystem services as a political strategy to halt and reverse ecological degradation. Dempsey’s most compelling doubts and criticisms are often our own, articulated through the surprising frank words of frontline proponents for ‘enterprising’ nature—e.g., wondering whether the ‘enterprising’ nature project has truly yielded much, for all the celebration, or claiming that ecosystem service markets are merely a fad. Dempsey even highlights the radical political implications of ecological science, while also drawing attention to the explicit and intentional choices that many scientists have made to ally with corporate and political power to make their case for conservation. Against these capitalist and elitist tendencies, Dempsey advocates for a “critical ecology” that will “discard dreams of mastery, to embrace highly dynamic, uncertain, and deep unknowns of the future” (p121), and that such an ecology should be “conducted… not to serve elite needs, but to serve [social] movements with a real chance of creating abundant, diverse futures” (p121).

The central challenge posed by the book lies in its prescription for conservation’s future success. Given that Dempsey, by her own admission, was always a sceptic of the neoliberal turn in conservation, readers may not be fully convinced by a journey that resulted in continued scepticism. Dempsey’s call for a grassroots politics of opposition to the fundamental capitalist forces causing environmental degradation may ring true but idealistic: of course it is needed, but can it redirect the juggernaut of global supply chains and consumer demands, when even the fiercest ecological activists cannot escape these relations? Ultimately we are all complicit in the destruction wrought by the capitalist logics of property, value, and profit, and many of us are already willing to challenge these fundamentals if given the chance. While emerging nuanced strategies seek to practically rework economic tools and logics in search of environmental justice, this book opts for an oppositional stance to financialization in toto, which may also prove constraining. However, nuances aside, the book does open these issues for discussion in a productive way, and for this reason it deserves a wide and engaged readership.

In sum, Enterprising Nature provides an empirically rigorous and analytically insightful assessment of the “selling nature to save it” hypothesis. Scientists, economists, policymakers, and conservationists of all stripes will benefit from this novel analysis of the interrelationships between biodiversity science, policy and finance. Dempsey excavates some important choices to scientists about how we choose to “do politics” through our science and through our alliances. With the terrain of biodiversity science and politics set to shift drastically over the coming years in the U.S. and internationally, more than ever conservationists need new and radical ideas; and this book provides some.  

Why Does the World Need IPBES?

by Kai Chan (disclosure: I'm not unbiased re: IPBES; I'm involved, as explained below) Edited for public consumption 2017.11.27

IPBES (the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) is operating on a shoestring budget to provide a critical service to humanity. But the funding will need to be renewed in 2020 and there is great uncertainty regarding the commitments nations will make given the current geopolitical context. So it’s worth pondering, why—after all—does the world need IPBES?

The usual argument against IPBES being an essential global institution is that problems of nature and its benefits to people (biodiversity and ecosystem services) are local or regional problems, unlike climate change. Without global dynamics, goes this argument, there’s no need for a global institution. Personally, I have wondered whether this is true. Even as late as mid-September, I wasn't sure if IPBES really was needed.

But problems of nature are global problems, in three key ways.

Male peacock spider: not only vertebrates are cool (Wiki).
Check out this amazing video of a courtship dance.

First, our responsibility for nature is global. Our grandchildren will thank us for saving wildlife and wild spaces wherever they occur. Correspondingly, if we fail to prioritize this, they will surely blame us for it, whether the extinguished flora and fauna are tropical rainforests, Arctic tundra, coral reefs, peacock spiders, tigers or emperor penguins—regardless of whether these wonders fall within our national borders.

Second, what happens elsewhere affects us here. ‘Telecoupling’ is real: when Indonesian forest fires associated with industrial agriculture choked much of Equatorial Asia with smoke and smog, over 100,000 people likely died prematurely in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia (NYTimes, ERL). 

Smoke from Indonesian forest fires, courtesy of NASA

 When expanding deserts in China—due to overgrazing, ‘bad cultivation’ and deforestation—allowed winds to pick up thousands of tons of fine sediment, people halfway across the world experienced yellow dust. This dust, which has been found in New Zealand and the French Alps, is estimated to cost Korea and Japan billions of dollars each year (Conversation). And the ongoing improper handling of plastics in many nations has resulted in a massive gyre of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean and our seafood being laced with plastic nodules—such that seafood eaters are likely consuming many thousands of pieces every year (Telegraph, Scientific Reports). Similarly, industrial processes have resulted in high levels of mercury, PCBs, and dioxins in many fish species, especially predators like swordfish, salmon, tuna, and mackerel. All that is just a handful of the ways that what happens far away matters locally.

Ocean plastics in Hawai'i (NOAA)

Third, what we do here drives what happens there. Have you eaten a candy bar recently? Some other processed food (much of which contains palm oil, whose production fuels the aforementioned land-use change and fires in Indonesia)? Then you’re complicit in the Indonesian fires. Do you eat imported meat and rice? If so, you’re partly responsible for the dust storms from Asia, as global markets spread our demand across distant sites of production. Do you use plastic products or anything with plastic production? Then you, like me, are complicit in the mass plasticization of the oceans.

Nature problems are global problems, so we need a concerted global effort to synthesize and advance the understanding of these problems—and their ultimate causes. By doing this, IPBES can enable appropriate responses among governments, NGOs, and the private sector. And when responses aren’t appropriate, this rigorously synthesized global information will enable other actors to hold their feet to the fire. Governments: keep funding IPBES. In fact, double your contribution, or more.

Clearly, IPBES can't solve these problems alone--and if you know me and CoSphere you know I think there are solutions to all these problems--but IPBES has a crucial role to play, as I'll explain in subsequent blog posts.

Readers: if you see the benefits of IPBES given the global nature of these problems, please like and share this page with the #fundIPBES hashtag. As a coordinating lead author of IPBES's Global Assessment and with other IPBES authors, I will use your support to convey the public support for continued and enhanced funding for IPBES to governments around the world.

PS, See my earlier posts about the IPBES conceptual framework, Intense Politics of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and how IPBES could make ecosystem service assessments useful. KC